I Stopped In The Woods

IMG_5643This past week we traveled two hours east to Winnsboro, Texas. It is a speck of a town that has traveled so far past its prime that it can no longer remember if it ever had a heyday. The center of town consists of a Brookshire’s grocery store where the clerk, Brittany, appears to be straight out of a John Mellencamp song.  Across the street sits the Dairy Queen, which also happens to be the only Wi-Fi hot spot in the town.  We spent our week tucked securely into David’s family’s lake house, which sits on Winnsboro Lake – a lake so small that you can see all sides of it almost from the same vantage point.  However, this also means we are frequently the only people on the lake and the lake house, well, it doesn’t have Internet, telephone or cable. As a matter of fact there isn’t even a TV in the lake house. photo-27These past seven days have been filled with late mornings lying in bed listening to the window unit cool the bedroom.  We have spent afternoons watching spring showers glide over the lake ruffling the water like sprinkles on a cake.  The kids have played countless games of Apples to Apples, Sorry, and checkers.  We’ve water skied, and jet skied and been pulled on water tubes. We made bonfires, ate s’mores and stayed up way past our bedtimes.  We got sunburned and have bug bites and have watched caterpillars cross the sidewalk.  We celebrated Grandma’s 94th birthday and went to the farmer’s market where we bought zucchini the size of smallphoto-28 footballs for a $1 a piece.  Max honed his fishing skills while riding on Uncle Bo’s small blue fishing boat. Uncle Bo being the kind of man who talks slow and can spin a tale as long as the fish he catches. We have spent the week cocooned in a world that would rival Thoreau’s Walden Woods. David and I are facing a cross roads in our path. A point in life where you recognize that either decision will lead you to a different destination and you are forced to stop and ask yourself, “where am I going”?  We have stopped in the woods. After a week of reflection I think we know which direction we are going to take and as it is with most large decisions in life it takes no small amount of blind faith. Faith that God will catch you – faith that your life will unfold as it should. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” – Thoreau

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